A 7-tesla MRI scanner manufactured by Siemens Healthineers has gone into clinical use at the University of Southern California (USC) Keck School of Medicine.
Siemens originally installed the Magnetom Terra scanner for research use at USC's Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute (INI) in February 2017. Siemens received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance to market Terra for clinical use in October 2017, and USC recently received hardware and software upgrades that enable the scanner to perform clinical work.
USC will use the system primarily for patients with neurological disease, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as multiple sclerosis, stroke, and vascular dementia.
The university noted that in 2017, two USC researchers used the Terra scanner to perform the first ultrahigh-resolution MRI scan of a patient with Cushing disease in the U.S., locating an extremely small pituitary tumor that would not have been visible with 1.5- or 3-tesla scanners. A paper on the findings was published in March 2018 in the Journal of Neurosurgery.
